Notes Around
ElectricFetus said:
How is not calling someone names too much "fairness" I'm not asking you to drop science, just pointing out when someone is resort to name calling, irrationality and fallacies.
Well, in the first place, let us consider what happens if your wish is granted:
• Anti-abortion advocates present insupportable rhetoric, call pro-choice people baby-killers.
• Pro-choice responds with statistics and other data showing the challenges facing the policy.
• Anti-abortion advocates reiterate their insupportable rhetoric, ignore pro-choice argument, call pro-choice advocates murderers.
— Somewhere in there, a doctor is shot to death.
— Several state governments rally to the insupportable rhetoric, pass new laws, and skip the bit about patient safety, boasting that the purpose is to shut down abortion in the state. (Note: This is the fastest way to get a usurpation of recognized constitutional rights thrown out, as Republicans in Mississippi learned.)
• Pro-choice reiterates statistics and data showing objective case in support of their position.
• Anti-abortion advocates ignore pro-choice argument, issue "Wanted Dead or Alive" posters.
— When another doctor is shot to death, the anti-abortion advocates split into two general camps: One seeks to justify the shooting of a mass-murdering doctor who performs legal abortions; the other seeks to separate the facts of the movment's violent rhetoric and inclusion of the eventual shooter in their community from the fact that said individual just committed murder.
— What does the world see? Part of the anti-abortion camp says, "It's not our fault." Another says, "He deserved to die!" And on the next day they will be one body politic again. Under what other circumstances are both state and society in general expected to be so tolerant of terrorism and murder?
• Here we can slip into the microcosm, or else simply reiterate the macrocosmic view of constant reiteration.
• In the microcosmic view, a choice advocate asks the obvious question:
Okay, look, what happens after you get your way?
• Over the course of fourteen months and over a thousand posts in the discussions, consideration of that question is willfully ignored.
• Along comes some dude who thinks he's got an answer:
Hey, you know, you guys should just be more polite to the anti-abortion advocates, and then maybe they'll be reasonable.
It's not that we don't get where you're coming from, but rather that your argument is insanely naïve for discounting history (constant disrespect, emotional appeals, and ad hominem arguments) and the current assertion that this is about the public relations war.
At which point we come back to the insults themselves. To call choice advocates murderers or baby-killers is subjective, kind of like calling someone an asshole is subjective. But misogyny? That can be objectively measured, and the only way around that is to once again hold women separate from humanity. Black? Hispanic? Illegal immigrant? Despite the best efforts of the racists, there are protections in place against passing "ostensibly" "neutral" legislation that disproportionately affects those groups. Yet when it comes to women? Well, the argument is that it is not misogynistic to deliberately pass a law that disproportionately impacts women, and in order to accommodate an aesthetic religious fantasy that has no historical, scientific, or other support. This would be an extraordinary assertion; we're talking about laws that disproportionately impact the majority of our population.
So let us get back to your proposition that we need to go easy on the anti-abortion advocates.
What do you expect this to accomplish?
What "surrender" am I asking for, to stay focused on the issue of disproving personhoood, to not stoop to their level?
You're asking for proof of negative, which is generally considered a fallacious demand.
The issue of personhood was granted at the outset in order to consider its impacts on women.
Fourteen months and thirteen hundred posts later, personhood advocates still refuse to address this question.
And here you are encouraging the abandonment of that question so that we might continue to play kid gloves with a fallacy deliberately intended to forestall discussion of the question.
Your recommendation amounts to:
Just give them what they want.
What happens next is an important consideration. Kind of like those people who want to abolish the Federal Reserve; it's not just that none of them can explain what happens next, or how life gets better as a result. There is also the fact that they tend to flee the question. The same applies here:
It is not simply that none of them can answer the question, but also that they are in screaming flight from it.
I'm not asking for "reconciliation" either just mature adult behavior.
And your request attends what period? Eternity?
What? When, in your opinion, is it okay to throw down and fight? Your present argument leaves open the possibility that one side of this argument ought to handicap itself forever. You know, in order to be "fair".
And therein lies the problem. Before these fourteen months, these thirteen hundred posts, certain lines were already drawn. These boundaries are fallacious and vicious. The sides have stopped talking to one another because at some point reality fails to persuade the fantasist in defense of his most valuable currency, the eternal soul. The sides are playing to the gallery, campaigning for electoral support.
History, ontology, and law mean nothing in effect to the anti-abortion campaign. This is observable in the laws they pursue and their refusal to establish their core argument—personhood
before conception (LACP in the topic proposition acknowledges the assertion that "conception" and "fertilization" are synonymous, and that
implantation of the zygote into the uterine wall—the medical consideration of conception—is irrelevant).
A great, apocryphal story from a guy I know who attended one of the nation's premiere universities: So he's at this party, getting stoned and huffing whippits. The air is thick with smoke and fuzzy, buzzing guitars, and he's over in the corner having one of the most incredible conversations of his life. Detailed, nuanced, philosophical ... it was a life-changing conversation—with a floor lamp.
I raise this point because the discussion he had with the sixty-cycle hum and its tonal variants in that environment was likely more substantial and productive than what you're pushing.
Forty-one years, sir. For over forty years, the anti-abortion movement has been pushing this fallacious argument, and for all conservatives complain about political correctness, they hide behind it on this count; it is not politically correct, apparently, to point out the fallacy—we must extend extraordinary charity and pretend that there is no fallacy.
Based on this fallacy, the movement has spent forty-one years thinking up new and not-so-creative ways of insulting the other side. Murderers, wanted dead or alive?
Talking
to the anti-abortion movement is largely problematic. Indeed, if they ever come up with something useful, we're happy to talk
to them. But as long as the prerequisite for communication means adoption of fallacy as fact, aesthetics as objective, and the statistically observable negative impacts of their policies on women as irrelevant to the issue, talking
to them is an exercise in futility.
In terms of campaigning? Yes, it is time for people to be aware of what they're supporting, which is a misogynistic outcome.
If their argument was objective,
then misogyny would be a much different consideration in this context.
The seasoned veterans of the anti-abortion movement will respond predictably, by complaining that accurate descriptions of his behavior are inappropriate in the discussion. But not everyone in our society is so resolved. Certainly, there will be some fence-sitters and even moderate choice advocates who will here the misogyny argument and be put off by it, but there are also some of those who will see its mechanics and their future decisions, like those put off by the argument, will be affected to some degree.
This is a campaign.
You want to talk
to the anti-abortion movement? They were given a chance in these threads:
Okay, so we grant your personhood, so what happens next?
Fourteen months. Thirteen hundred posts through two versions of this thread.
Where is the answer?
They have been offered a chance to talk to us, to address our concerns that they apparently believe exaggerated or invented as fantasy, or whatever, and this despite the fact that those concerns have observable elements in play today.
And whether we want to address the implications of LACP, the incarceration of pregnant women in hospitals, the use of laws ostensibly passed to protect women from domestic violence to prosecute women for miscarriages, or even the mere history and ontology of their argument, the answer is always the same hardline insistence without any real explanation.
Even their "triage model" is intended to avoid this discussion; we've been hearing about it for fourteen months, and it only really
came to a head in
recent days. We have been subject to this assertion of a "triage model" through most of these fourteen months, and it has always been a very dry, nondescript assertion. But take a look at what happens when people try to
apply the process in
practical theory.
No, really. You get
faux disbelief and a repetition of the nondescript assertion.
And
more disbelief and indignance.
And
incomprehensible posts.
I mean, advocates are more willing to talk about who came up with the idea than actually explain in practical terms how it works.
In the end, though, we come back to your question:
How is specifically refraining from accurate descriptions of bad behavior fair?
How is not calling someone names too much fairness? When the effect of that appeal is to banish accurate descriptions of bad behavior from the discussion.
Analogously, we might suggest that it is not "fair" to call Ivan Okhlobystin homophobic. After all, that's just not fair. All he said was that he would roast every gay person alive in an oven. I mean, to call that "homophobic" is just a desperate political slur, right?
That is the essence of what you're arguing. That it is unfair to call the willful harm of women in order to fulfill a fantasy misogynistic.
If that's the new battleground, so be it. One side of this dispute bases its fundamental arguments on analyses of fact. The other bases its fundamental arguments in an unsupported ontological assertion specifically crafted to foment this dispute. But we certainly shouldn't call that fallacy misogynistic for the harm it would cause women, right?
Because willfully harming women in pursuit of one's own aesthetic fantasy is anything
but misogynistic.
Right?
• • •
Lightgigantic said:
Or alternatively, Bell's la la land, where she demands others not "perversely" interfere with the "reproductive organs of women" yet simultaneously demand a host of public infrastructure measures to facilitate solutions to problems associated with the "reproductive organs of women".
Would you assert that reproductive health is not part of health care?
It is problematic, in consideration of history, to try to turn the question of whether or not to exclude a woman's reproductive care from health insurance into some unreasonable demand that finds its most prominent expression in people like Rush Limbaugh and Mike Huckabee, who apparently don't have a clue what they're talking about. Indeed, those who would inquire whether better women's health, mental health, economic standing, and educational achievement can be attributed in any way to legal abortion, or whether those results are from other parts of feminism, can see there the spillover. Remember that LACP would outlaw hormonal birth control and IUDs, because they prevent implantation, and LACP is actually Life at Fertilization Personhood.
In the end, what we have is a set of laws pertaining to health care. In order to be "fair" to a substantial political bloc, those laws are being customized to exclude a range of women's reproductive health care. The resulting dispute is one of equal protection for women, not some radio host's obsession with women who get laid.
• • •
Wynn said:
Note the striking similarity between Bells' and right-winger rhetorics.
Same bosiness. Same presumption of moral and cognitive superiority. Same ignoring of what the other person is actually saying. Same absolute confidence. Same assumption of total authority.
Note the lack of any substantial response. Once again we come back to the old conservative argument:
I can insult you according to my fantasy, but how dare you accurately describe my behavior!
Or, to put it simply, you're a really bad campaigner, Wynn. At some point, people might start believing you're a pro-choice advocate in the middle of one of history's worst provocateur performances.
• • •
Bells said:
Is this yet another tactic? Whine that women get to have rights over their reproductive organs and get safe health care and services at the same time?
While the tactical approach is unclear, the neurotic suggestion is apparent:
A Possible Argument:
(1) Yes, women are humans and entitled to human rights.
(2) Yes, the fact that women can become pregnant must proscribe their human rights.
(3) These are the reasons why.
(4) This is what needs to happen, and the impacts as we understand them.
The observation that LG and his fellows still refuse to acknowledge point (1) above is telling.
Of course, so is the forty-one years since
Roe that the anti-abortion movement has spent avoiding this argumentative structure.
Thus, to reiterate:
The problem with the topic proposition might well be that in order to suspend a woman's general human rights she must first have them.
I mean, how easy is it to attend points one and two? Therein lies the tragedy; we can never get to points three and four because that first sentence represents a belief or acknowledgment that has yet to germinate within the anti-abortion movement.
